There’s nothing new about the sexist Remainer elite sneering at Liz Truss
The Foreign Secretary took on an impossible mission in Moscow and survived – not that you would know it from those dismissing her as ‘Dizzy Lizzy’
MNobody has to like a politician, but the widespread choice of ‘lightweight’ as the term of insult cannot be a coincidence … it’s hard to imagine Raab being referred to in those terms
y current WhatsApp profile picture is that famous 1986 photo of Margaret Thatcher begoggled and riding in a tank during a visit to troops in West Germany. It’s just so splendid: the perfect image of the no-nonsense fierceness of Britain’s first lady PM, who saw things far more clearly – morally and politically – than almost anyone (Churchill excepted) before or since.
When a mirror image of Foreign Secretary Liz Truss appeared last November on a tank in Estonia while visiting British troops deployed there as part of Nato’s “forward presence”, I got the joke, for joke it still is. Truss is no Thatcher – at least, not yet.
But the Foreign Secretary and leadership contender is experienced, good at maths and economics and the nuts and bolts of business; interested in women’s rights and, once a staunch Remainer, now a staunch Brexiteer, hungrily pursuing trade deals in her former role as international trade secretary. She is only the second-ever female foreign secretary after Margaret Beckett, and the Tories’ first. She has her hands full; after all, the sexists who still run much of the world will never take even the very best female representatives as seriously as they do the silliest of men.
But for Truss, mockery abroad is matched by mockery at home where, especially among a contingent of elite Remainers, there is a desperation to see her fail. On Thursday, she met with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, one of the most sinister men in the world. Instead of being glad the British Foreign Secretary made it out alive from an impossible mission, they seemed to rejoice at Lavrov’s coarse attempts to make mincemeat of her. It was a similar sort of beating to that which Thatcher faced routinely at the start: 10 years in, not so much.
Perhaps the same will be true of Truss. Either way, there she was, doing quite a good job leading Britain’s attempt to dissuade Russia from invading Ukraine. It was not an easy meeting. At the press conference afterwards, Lavrov said with astonishing incivility that “it was like a conversation with a deaf person. Who is here, but doesn’t hear,” and sneered that relations with Britain “leave much to be desired”.
Lavrov is famously awful. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton found him to be “a jerk”. A highranking foreign policy official under George W Bush described him as “a complete a--hole”, while an Obama diplomat described him as “offensive, cruel, unlikeable, caddish … nothing redeemable about Lavrov”. Considering recent events, he is now as dangerous as he is deeply unpleasant. And yet the Remainiac elite seemed to take from the doomed exchange nothing but glee.
On Thursday, Twitter drove itself into a frenzy over Truss’s meeting, glorying in deriding her as a “lightweight” and castigating her for “thinking about photo ops”, posting gifs of her speaking over the translators, and revisiting, again and again, the mistake she made about the sovereignty of two obscure Russian regions. When compared with the gaffes US presidents regularly make, including Biden and even Obama, who recently confused Scotland with Ireland while at Cop26, this was nothing.
Plenty of women were among those going for Truss. Dr Jennifer Cassidy, a scholar of diplomacy at Oxford, tweeted: “Can’t even make some comedic quip about Liz Truss travelling to Moscow in an attempt to put sanctions on Russia. It’s a truly terrifying concept that Liz Truss is the UK’s diplomatic envoy during these escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine. Truly terrifying.” One might think of something slightly more terrifying: that a gangster state is pushing Europe to the brink of war.
In sum, two deeply unpleasant aspects of the Remainer stance have been outed in all this. The first is its existential anti-Britishness. Pitted against a nasty, expansionist and destabilising country such as Russia, you might think that Remainers could put aside their obsession with being in Club Europa for a moment, and get behind our attempts – which have been some of the West’s most forthright – to deter an invasion. But no, the desire to punish us for Brexit is so strong it’s as if some of them would rather see Russia prevail.
Keen to avoid appearing proRussian, of course, there has been some backpedalling. Dr Cassidy, for example, later said she had gone much harder on Raab than Truss. Others tweeted out belated condemnations of Putin, Lavrov and their regime, not quite realising that if you even have to clarify a point like that then you have already gone too far.
Such caveats aside, there is no escaping the second discomfiting aspect of the Remainer response: what has sounded rather like the sort of misogyny Thatcher faced early in her career and her premiership. Nobody has to like a politician, but the widespread choice of “lightweight” as the term of insult cannot be a coincidence. No matter how useless, it’s hard to imagine Raab being referred to in those terms. Someone called her “Dizzy Lizzy”; another even mocked her voice, just as Thatcher’s was mocked.
It was telling that during Emmanuel Macron’s talks with Putin last week, this avid diplomacy-watching crew were quiet – never mind that the exchange, embarrassingly hailed as a breakthrough, ended with Putin basically threatening nuclear war if Nato ever were to help Ukraine regain Crimea.
Macron is easily twice as ridiculous as Truss. But he’s a man, and he’s European and, as was made clear last week, the desire among Remainers to see Britain humiliated over all else is simply too strong to resist.